


Canonical Highlander Snippets

by MarbleGlove



Series: Comment Fic [8]
Category: Highlander - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-01
Updated: 2012-06-01
Packaged: 2017-11-18 20:17:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 19
Words: 8,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/564863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MarbleGlove/pseuds/MarbleGlove
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Four Is Death (from TV Tropes)</p>
          </blockquote>





	1. He Knew What Was What

Richie was a street kid and he knew what was what. He knew that street kids had hard lives and short ones and the fact that they were happier on the street than back at their original homes, well, that said a lot.   
  
He didn't expect to ever grow old enough to drink legally so there was no reason to wait until then. It was the same rational that had him follow the guy with the sword. Sure, the man could kill Richie, but then so could a whole hell of a lot of other things, and he was curious. So there really wasn't much to lose but a lot to win in satisfying his curiosity.   
  
As it turned out, there was more to win than he had ever dreamed of. There was a home, and a job, and a pair of almost-parents. There was art and Paris.   
  
It was a miracle, that kept on getting more miraculous because even when he did die, still too young to drink beer legally in the United States, it still kept going.   
  
There were motorcycles and girls and an almost-father. There were secrets and tuxedos.   
  
There was the promise of forever.   
  
But there were also killers out to get him and fights to the death, and Richie was a street kid. He'd gotten a miracle twice now, getting off the street and surviving his own death. But surviving The Game would take whole new miracle and he knew what was what. He would try for three times the charm, but he didn't really expect to receive it.   
  
He'd try his hardest, but he knew he'd been living on borrowed time since he first hit the streets.   
  
It was still better than where he'd been before.

 


	2. The Answer is Yes

The answer is yes.  _Oh yes._

Methos is so old that the questions don’t matter anymore. He’s so old that his memory doesn’t stretch back far enough to a time when they _ever_ mattered. 

Is he a killer? Is he a healer?

Sometimes the answers are sequential: He was a killer for this time period (yes, oh yes), he was a healer for that time period (yes, oh yes)

Is he a sinner? Is he a saint?

Other times, the answers are a matter of perspective: He sinned according to the Romans (yes, oh yes), he was a saint according to the Muslims (yes, oh yes).

Is he a defender? Is he an attacker?

Sometimes it shows him how confusing battles really are: He has preemptively attacked his enemies to defend his people (yes, oh yes) and he has been ambushed in turn (yes, oh yes.)

Does the world change? Does the world stay the same?

Is it true? Is it false?

Questions about history, about philosophy, about people, don’t come in easy yes/no dichotomies. They’re always open-ended. And yet, so many people have asked Methos for a simple answer. Duncan is merely one of a thousand who have asked for a simple answer.

What is the meaning of The Game?

What is the meaning of Life?

The answer is yes.

Methos loves life. He has gone everywhere, seen everything, been everyone. When people ask him a question, the answer is yes, oh yes. When the world itself asks him a question, the answer is yes, oh yes.

Oh yes.

Always and forever, yes.


	3. 5 things Methos knows that no one else does and 1 he tells Joe

1\.   
Methos knows about demons, despite his protestations to the contrary, but he’s hardly the only person who knows. MacLeod has personal experience with a demon, as have various other people around the world. While many people doubt these first hand accounts, some people believe them. What Methos is unique in knowing, though, is that demons feed on that belief. The best way to get rid of a demon is to disbelieve it. The problem with knowing something like that, though, is that it’s not the kind of knowledge that can be shared.  
  
2.  
Methos once met Jesus of Nazareth. Well, “met” might be overstating it a bit. He saw him from a distance, one amongst a crowd of hundreds, maybe thousands. He wasn’t the only immortal to make a pilgrimage to see the recent prophet. A lot of immortals (the smart ones) keep track of the local religions and cults because you never know where new holy ground might pop up. But religion makes people angry, so while there were other immortals who could have said if Jesus of Nazareth had a quickening or not, they’re all dead. Methos knows better than to say anything one way or the other about a religious leader.   
  
3.  
The question of how the pyramids of Egypt were built has puzzled historians and scientists for centuries--theories have ranged from pure slave labor to special mechanical devises to alien technology. It has never puzzled Methos because he was there for at least part of it. Every so often Methos looks up the most recent theory but doesn’t bother to respond to any of them. He was there, he knows how they were made, and he’s not particularly interested in getting into the academic fight where his only evidence is the eye-witness account of an immortal who’s not about to claim to be an immortal.   
  
4.  
Methos knows what manna tastes like. He’s collected recipes off and on for most of his life but never found anything else that really resembles it. Or rather, he has found many things that taste like it but since none of them taste like each other, it’s not something that can be described. It’s frustrating that taste is a sense that is so difficult to describe. After the death of his brothers, he doesn’t think there is another living person in the world who remembers the taste of manna. He’s never even been tempted to tell anyone how the Christian’s foretold Harbingers of the Apocalypse had eaten manna. But he wishes sometimes he could share the experience with someone else.   
  
5\.   
Methos knows how to read “Linear B,” as it’s now called. He finds the number of people who are obsessed with translating it somewhat irritating. Explaining the language, though, would both attract unwanted attention to Adam Pierson and be kind of boring. It’s not that it’s a boring language per se, although it kind of is, it’s that there’s nothing very interesting written in it. Even those parts of his older journals are boring.   
  
+1  
There are all sorts of things that Methos has done or seen in the past and which he has stopped seeing or doing just because life moves on. He’s a modern sort of guy, but somehow it still comes like a punch to the gut when he’s researching in one of the Watcher’s archives and he hears some of the more modern era historians discussing what a giga might have looked or sounded like. Methos had played a giga for years to keep his family and friends entertained during the cold Norwegian winters. He’d taught his nephews (and one of his nieces) how to play it. He’d learned how to make them from his grandfather-in-law.   
  
It takes the better part of a year for him to find the right supplies and remember the right techniques but in the end, he has a new giga. Joe has been commenting, only half teasingly, about his new propensity for brooding, but Methos thinks of it has a period of nostalgia.   
  
When it’s done, he brings it into the bar. Methos avoids acting anachronisticly, it’s a dangerous tell to anyone looking for immortals, but Joe is special. Joe already knows who Methos is and he’s a musician. Joe should know what a giga looks and sounds like.

 


	4. 4 is Death

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Four Is Death (from TV Tropes)

Methos had been alone for nearly two thousand years before he met Kronos. It was the way of immortals in that time period to live on their own, gaining and losing mortal families but having no immortal companions.

The three rules were simple enough to explain to any new immortals and it was considered appropriate to give any new immortal a three-day head-start if you wanted to challenge him. The teacher-student dynamic hadn’t developed yet.

Kronos wasn’t willing to accept that.

Kronos had led the warriors of his people and under his people had survived every battle and triumphed over every foe. But Kronos had been raised to the position of leader of the warriors. While he had natural talent at fighting, at teaching others to fight, and at leading them in battle, he was also well educated in the process and knew the value of that education.

There were many talented fighters out in the world, and many of those talented fighters had tried to conquer his people. They had failed. It had taken something more than human to finally defeat his people. His people, Kronos included, had died in a plague. He had woken up from his first death late enough in the process that there had been no one to object to his awakening but early enough to help nurse the rest of the village as they died off.

He had mourned them, but knew that the gods must want more from him if he had been given a second life to live. He just had to find out what they wanted.

The first immortal he met told him the rules and then told him to leave, because she didn’t want to die and she didn’t want to kill him. That seemed fair. He had asked her why they were as they were and she had shrugged. “You should ask one of the old ones, that. I’m still living with my parents. The man who told me the rules said he was a thousand years old but I don’t think he knew how to count. Maybe if there is a man who is truly a thousand years old, he will know why we are here.”

That seemed like good advice.

After much searching, he found Methos.

Methos who had lived for two thousand years and had two wagons, one to carry the writings of others and one to carry his own. He was old enough to know many answers, old enough to have forgotten many more. He didn’t even know how he had first died. His first death was simply by death.

Methos who wouldn’t even listen to his questions.

“You listen to the questions of these mortals. You travel around asking questions and answering them. Why, then, do you not listen to me?”

“Because you are immortal. Immortals do not speak with each other. The rules are: Fight one-on-one. Never fight on holy ground. There can be only one.”

“There are two of us here now. So there does not have to be only one.”

“I do not want to kill you and I do not want to die. I don’t think I’ll risk breaking that third rule. Go away.”

“If I can prove to you that we can travel together, that we can be brothers, will you teach me?”

Methos stared at him for a long moment. Very well. “If you can prove that we do not have to be only one, then I will ride by your side and answer what questions I can. But until then, go away.”

“Swear it, old one, and I will go away until I can prove that we can ride together.”

“I swear. Now go.”

So Kronos left and searched for a way to prove that there could be more than one.

None of the immortals he found could help him. Some he killed, most he let live, but none would travel with him.

Until he found a new immortal. Kronos explained to the new immortal, to Caspian, the rules of immortality. “Now comes the time when I should leave or ask you to leave,” Kronos said. “Instead, would you like to travel with me?” Caspian had died at war and he was fearless.

“Yes. I will travel with you. We shall be brothers and when meet your future brother, Methos, again. He and I shall be brothers as well. If I have defied the gods already by awakening from death, I can defy them again by being brothers with you.”

They rode off in search of Methos.

It was not an easy search. They struggled to track the ancient one. Among other difficulties, they traveled through a famine stricken land where they found another new immortal.

He had trained the animals for his village and he mourned their loss more than the people who had slaughtered them to postpone their own deaths. He was a shrunken man with a large build. Kronos and Caspian shared their supplies with him. They explained the rules to him and offered him the chance to break that last rule.

Silas agreed.

And so they searched and eventually the three of them, immortals and brothers, found Methos.

“Methos,” Kronos called out. “Let me introduce my brothers. This is Caspian and this is Silas. They have traveled with me for many years and we do not raise swords at each other.”

“If I join you, I will be the fourth brother in your band. And four is a very unlucky number.”

“Come now, old one. I have proven that there can be more than one. You have sworn to ride with me if I did so. Come ride with me and be our brother. The eldest and yet the newest brother.”

“The fourth brother,” Methos corrected. “Four is a very unlucky number, but I did swear, and you have proven that we can ride together. So together we shall ride, the four of us, immortal by pestilence, by war, by famine, and by simple death.”

 


	5. Sloth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What counts as sin changes from culture to culture and from time to time

"You are sinful today. Did you stay up too late into the night?" Kronos was prepared for a hard days hunting but addressed Methos with amusement.  
  
"Mmm," Methos responded from his repose on a pile of furs set out in the warm sun and cool breeze. He felt utterly relaxed and without a care in the world.  
  
With a surge of willpower, he rolled over on his back so that he could look lazily up at his brother. "Have you noticed that the stars have changed? And yet, the moon has not. And the Earth has changed but not in any regular pattern. What do you think of that?"  
  
Kronos put aside his hunting equipment and stretched out beside him. "I think it is a good thing we have no priest for he would surely smite you for asking the question." He sounded perfectly content with the situation. "Does that mean that the Earth is more like the stars while we Immortals are more like the moon?"  
  
"I think some day we will find the path to take us to the stars and we will go and see for ourselves."  
  
"I remember the first time I saw someone ride a horse. I wonder if perhaps somewhere someone has figured out how to harness the birds of the air."  
  
Lazing in the sun in the middle of the day with his brother by his side, Methos felt no qualm in asking a taboo question. "Do you think we'll fly, one day?"  
  
And Kronos felt no compunction in challenging the gods themselves. "Surely we will."  
  
Killing had never been a crime any of his tribes any more than it was among this brotherhood of four. Death within the tribe was horrible, but the killing of Others was perfectly fine. Methos understood that to all the people he killed, they were part of a Tribe and he was an Other -- it was an interesting thought that Methos toyed with occasionally, but it hardly mattered.  
  
Sloth, though, was the true crime in any tribe. To waste time on thoughts that hardly mattered, to waste time that could have been spent gathering food or building shelter or creating weapons was a deadly sin.  
  
Relaxing in the spring day, seeing his brother just as relaxed, rambling about taboo subjects and forbidden thoughts, he thought this sinful brotherhood was his paradise.


	6. God of Blindness

For a thousand years, Methos was a _God_.

He was  _Death_.

The world all the people upon it bent to his will.

He was a force of nature, and with his brothers at his side, none could gainsay him. Everything he wanted, he got; everything he commanded, was done. He wore robes of blinding white and rode whether he desired and all the population whispered his name with fear and awe. Those who challenged him died bloody deaths along with all their family.

He had wealth and power and the very heavens bowed before him.

For a thousand years…

And then one day, Methos looked and saw not strength, but blindness.

Not grandeur, but shrunken pettiness. He had nothing that could not be taken by strength. He had everything he wanted only because he had restricted his desires so tightly that he only wanted what little he could take.

No friends or lovers, for they could not be forced to feel. No fields of wheat or herds of cattle because they could not be guaranteed through the dry seasons or the wet. No family other than his brothers for they could not be kept alive against the passage of time.

He looked around the encampment. The day before his eyes had passed over the tokens of gold and silver, and been pleased. This day he looked instead at the dirt and bloody mud and was disgusted.

“Come brother, what causes that look of distress? Tell me, and I shall kill it for you.”

There was mockery in the offer as well as true support, for Kronos implied that Methos might not be able to kill his own target. Methos couldn’t even manage to scowl back.

There was no target here to be killed for Methos’ pleasure, and if there was, Kronos was no more able to slaughter it than Methos.

For the first time in a thousand years, Methos felt weak and helpless for while he could kill an army, destroy a civilization, such actions would only make the disgust that much worse.

He turned to his brother to voice his dismay but stopped short. Kronos looked over their camp with pleased pride. It was like taking pride in a heat mirage.

“I will go riding.” Methos spoke abruptly.

He would go riding and he would not turn back. He wished he were able to unsee what he had seen, take back his delusions of grandeur, but there was nothing there and he could not. And the only thing worse, he thought, than living in that travesty of a camp, would be live there with his brothers when they thought it a palace.


	7. Letting Go

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This was in response to the prompt:  
> Highlander, Methos(/any), You were always hard to hold, so letting go is easy

They were brothers for a thousand years, but they weren’t together all the time. They loved to ride across the landscape making the ground thunder with their approach and drink the blood of their departure. It is a joy to have brothers like his brothers, to know that they are stronger and deadlier and better than anyone else, and never need to fear being alone. They have each other and Silas wouldn’t give that up for anything in the world.  
  
But sometimes Silas just wanted to settle down and watch the seasons pass for a time, to care for some animals, see them born, train them, breed them, and watch the generations pass. His brothers understand this, or at least Kronos does and Kronos makes sure the others do as well.  
  
His brothers each have their own interests as well, but since Silas’ wildernesses are the most stable, they generally gather to him again when they return from their individual jaunts.  
  
Kronos likes to join militaries, sometimes, likes to conquer a city and rule it, likes for a whole people to look to him for protection as well as destruction. Of the four of them, he is the one who is most often called a god.  
  
Caspian is the most like a god, though. He’s the one who hears voices. Sometimes he’ll obey the voices, sometimes he’ll deny them, but when the voices speak, the four of them all know to pay attention.  
  
Methos is the most easily bored. He doesn’t settle like the three of them. He’s a grand storyteller but he’s never satisfied with the stories that keep the rest of them entertained. He always wants something more, something new. He’s the one who leaves to explore on his own the most often and he returns the quickest.  
  
When they’re all apart for a while, he’ll often rotate between the three of them. He’ll spend a season training the animals with Silas and then go to be Kronos’ adviser and then on to be Caspian’s disciple before going out on his own to apprentice himself to learn some new skill. He’s like a butterfly, Silas thinks, skipping from this flower to that one, never settling.  
  
The only way to keep him in one place would be to pin him down and then he wouldn’t be who he is anymore. But for a thousand years, in all his wanderings Methos has always returned to the three of them, to their riding and raiding and crossing the land.  
  
Silas is joyful each time Methos returns to them, but he is also surprised. He doesn’t tell any of them this, not Kronos or Caspian, not even Methos himself. But he is surprised each and every time over the course of those thousand years that Methos returns to them.  
  
When Methos leaves and doesn’t return, that final time, Kronos first gets frustrated, wondering when he’ll return. Caspian becomes worried, that something has happened. Kronos becomes enraged that his brother has vanished. But Silas… Silas knows that his eldest brother was never theirs to keep, not permanently. He returned to them a hundred times, but before Methos could ever have returned he had to have left them.


	8. What do you fear?

He spent a lifetime or more searching for his lost brother, and in the search for their elder, the younger ones fell by the wayside.

He spent a lifetime or more conquering kingdom after kingdom and making of himself a beacon that his lost brothers might find him. But none of them did.

He spent a lifetime or more in a monastery, searching for faith in a greater being, a being greater than he had been, than his brothers had been, than they had been as a foursome, riding across the land. He wept and fasted, he rent his clothes and screamed to the heavens and moaned at the pits of hell, and found no one to listen in either place.

His brothers were gone and he was alone.

He had had fame and power, family and followers. It had seemed infinite and yet it had flickered and gone out in a moment.

He was no prophet. He didn’t see the world in the life of the animals as Silas did. He didn’t see the future in the writings of the scholars as Methos did. He didn’t see the spirits in the voices in his head as Caspian did.

He was no prophet but still he saw his own death coming ever closer. It was coming for him and he would have no company in that long dark ending.

He shivered in cold and fear at the thought of being ushered out of this world. He covered the fear in rage, wrapped himself in obsession. He was the end of the world, and if he would die, he would send the whole world to await him in the dark.

And maybe, if he sent so many into that black abyss, it might fill and no longer yawn before him as a darkness waiting for him to fall.

And maybe, if he had his brothers with him once more, they would shine so brightly that they would light the whole world on fire, chasing away every shadow, leaving nothing to fear.

Maybe, maybe something might someday be enough to stop the fear.

Even as he stalked the nights, armed and dangerous, Kronos shivered in fear.


	9. Memories, Ideas, and Joy of Life

For a thousand years, when Methos was the strategist for the Apocalypse, his journals were full of war strategies and maps 

How to infiltrate a city, how to terrorize a society, how to bait an ambush. A thousand years of war strategy focusing on a using a small four-man force to destroy armies. It was a constant joy to challenge himself and see how far he could push their limits. They achieved miracles, but there were always new limits to push, new strategies to devise, new techniques to test out…

Until the day when there wasn’t.

One day Methos had sat in his tent, toying with his ink, and wasting his parchment, because he couldn’t think of a new strategy. They had done everything he could think of. New strategies would all require that the opposing side act in new and interesting ways and they weren’t. It took him a year to realize that he was well and truly bored.

He captured Cassandra to keep himself amused but it was only a taste of what else there was out there. She knew things about healing and herbs that he didn’t know, but she had been a mere apprentice to a mere local village elder.

It was not enough.

His mind, like his journals, was empty and waiting to be filled.

When he left his brothers and their Apocalypse behind, he had feared he would miss them.

Instead, he found a dozen things to distract him, a hundred things, a thousand. Suddenly there was not enough time in the day or space on the parchment to write down all he was learning.

There was medicine and philosophy and botany and mathematics and architecture and so much more.

A thousand skills he had missed out on learning when all he did was steal the product for a thousand years. He was overwhelmed with choice. Within ten years he had filled up more journals than he had in the preceding ten centuries. They had recipes and proofs and stories and poems.

When he looks back at the journals now, it seems like they were written by two different men. The journals of the Apocalypse are straight forward and boring and he rarely goes back to review them. The journals from afterwards though, spark memories and ideas each time he re-read them and inspire in him again the joy of life and discovery.


	10. This too shall pass

The priest had come by several times to check on Methos, sitting his silent vigil in the church, but he only shook his head and the priest went away again.

Darius would have sat beside him in silence for as long as it took Methos to give up and demand a game of chess to drown out their silent debate on faith.

Methos had grown up worshiping nature spirits. Every tree had a spirit, every rock and every stream required proper respect and reverence.

Once, he had spent several centuries worshipping a single tree. He had nurtured it from a seed and watched it grow. He had fertilized it with the blood from his veins and he had defended the village that grew around it with the blood of his enemies. At a time when he was so close to losing his faith, he had loved that tree.

It had grown great and thick and bright and a grove had grown around it.

He had loved it until it died and beyond.

There had been no great tragedy.

It had been healthy and cared for. There had been no lightning strike or ax blade. It had merely grown old and time had taken it away.

He had not allowed it to be harvested or burned or removed from the grove it had started and lived in for so long and he had stayed with it until it’s body had returned to the earth entirely. By the time it was gone, so too were every single living person other than himself who had ever known it when it lived. The young child who had climbed it one last time before it got too brittle had already died of old age.

Another time, he had stayed in a village on the side of the mountain. He had married and his wife had had children. The village was small and poor and so he traveled as a merchant, but always returned with funds to support his family. He returned every few months while his wife lived and together they had worshipped the spirit of the mountain.

After she had been laid to her final rest, he had taken longer trips. But he had returned to help his children and his children’s children and their children too. The trips grew progressively longer and he had remarried many times, and lived many different lives, but he tried to return at least once a generation to see his family. He no longer worshiped the mountain, though, because they didn’t, and because each time he returned, it was less a mountain and more a worn hill.

The wind was taking it away with each breath.

There were spirits everywhere, even in people, and some of them grew to be gods. But all of them faded away again.

People worshiped them when they were strong, begging them for blessings and protections or merely to refrain from raining down fire. Methos understood the desire to worship something greater than himself, to worship and ask for something and hope that it is delivered and maybe it will be.

But the only thing greater than himself that he has ever known is time. It has given him great gifts, he knows. It has given him everything he is or has been or will be. But it also takes those gifts away. Everything he is or has been or will be, everything anyone else is or has been or will be, all disappear into the mouth of time, to be chewed up and vanish into nothingness.

He misses Darius and nothing that tortured young man on the cross offers can bring back his old friend.

Darius had a faith in something that was greater than him. Darius had thought there was something greater than him and that that something was good.

Methos knows that there is something greater than him, his own god of time, but he has no faith in time. Not in its goodness or its evil, not in its ability to care about him or to even notice him in passing. Maybe time could give him back what he has lost, but it will not, he knows.

Let others worship and in the shadow of their faith he will find some protection from the overwhelming power of his own god who rolls over his life without pause or care. The only thing offered here, in this house of faith, was temporary escape from the Game and the hunter who stalks him at the perimeter.

Methos continues to sit patiently in pious stillness in the church pew. He has been there for the better part of the day staring up at the alter where a tortured young man looks down at him from his endless crucifixion.

_Don’t worry, young Jesus,_ he wants to say. _This too shall pass.  One day your religion will fall, as all the others have fallen. Your worshippers will pass away, first into myth and then into nothingness, and you will be allowed down from your cross. It’s not mercy or justice or anything that prayer can either cause or deny. It just is. Your tortures may feel endless now, but all things pass eventually._

If Darius had been the priest here, he would have said it aloud and Darius would have shushed him.   
  
_Come now, old friend,_ he would have said. _It doesn't matter that one day it will be gone, for it is here right now and it will always have been here right now in this moment of time. It is enough._  
  
 _It isn't enough,_ he wants to argue back. _You are gone and I am left._  
  
 _Yes, you are left_  
  
And the hunter has finally given up and gone on his way and maybe it is time for Methos to be on his way, too, before the live priest comes back again.  
  
Nothing is solved but a momentary escape from the Game, and after his long day of contemplation he still knows that his god is time itself, and that he will never ever worship it.


	11. An Old and Rusty Sword

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This was in response to the prompt:  
> Highlander, Methos,
> 
> "Your sword’s grown old and rusty  
> Burnt beneath the rising sun  
> It’s locked up like a trophy  
> Forgetting all the things it’s done"  
> \-- Giving up the Gun by Vampire Weekend

The museum exhibit catches Methos by surprise. 

The sword is horribly corroded and notched. The leather around the handle had obviously rotted off years ago leaving a few stubborn patches behind. It would probably crack if it were ever used again. But for all its ruin, it is his sword. Its name is Devourer of Souls. Just seeing it again, he can feel the phantom weight of the sword on the palm of hand. His heart rate increases and he’s suddenly ravenous for a quickening. He wants desperately to challenge an immortal, any immortal, and feel the quickening pound into him. He would raise Devourer high above his head, to pierce the very heavens, and drink in the soul of his vanished opponent.

“Hey old man, see something of your?” MacLeod claps him on the shoulder and chuckles a bit at the running joke. He leans over the glass case to look at the description. He doesn’t know how close he came to dying. Not for making a joke, just for being immortal and being in Methos’ presence.

After they'd found out about him, Joe and Mac liked to tease him about visiting museums to see his old stuff, but it actually happens only rarely. Even on those rare occasions when he sees something of his, there’s always the faint doubt that maybe he’s just misremembering. He’s owned a lot of objects over the years, used a lot of tools. So seeing a familiar one in a glass case may mean that specific object had been his or merely that he’d had something similar. It’s his own version of deja vu.

But there was no way he could forget that sword, on display in the glass case.

Methos takes a careful breath.

“Huh. This brass sword is interesting.” MacLeod remarked. “They think it was probably a family heirloom. It was used intermittently for several centuries. It could have been one of us, I suppose, but was found hanging over the mantel of a house buried in a mudslide. I image an immortal would have gone back for it.”

Methos takes another careful breath.

The mountain itself had buried his wife, his sister-in-law and his mother-in-law along with the Devourer of Souls.  He had known then that it was time to move on.

He had started changing his name after that. A new name for every life. He doesn’t name his swords any more, either. His current sword is a good one. Well balanced, and made by a professional swordsmith who works the Renaissance Faire circuit.  Methos uses the sword as a tool and cares for it as a tool. It has no name, it has no expectations.

He looks at the sword locked up like a trophy in the museum. It’s old and rusty, its name long since gone. It is a mere relic and cannot call to him anymore. It has forgotten all that it has done and Methos will do nothing to remind it.

“Yes, yes, Mac. I’m sure it’s very interesting, but did you really drag me to this museum to look at scrap metal?”

Mac rolls his eyes. “I don’t know how you of all people can have no appreciation of the past. But no, there was something else I wanted to show you.” 

They go to another room of the exhibit to look at some manuscripts, leaving behind a nameless sword, old and rusted, locked in a case.

 


	12. No dichotomy

Methos has a thousand interests and preferences and desires, but he is careful to ration them out to each of his personas in a reasonable manner, ensuring that his changing personas don't overlap too much. Adam Pierson liked beer but Matthew had liked wine and Timothy had been a pothead. They all had different music tastes, they had different accents, they had different interests... except for geology.   
  
Ever since geology had become a science, since there had been records, Methos hadn't been able to resist reading about the formation of the Earth. When TV was invented, when the History Channel started showing documentaries, he would watch scientists talk about things that were older than him.   
  
In time lines that included all of humanity as a flash in the pan in comparison to millions of years and geological changes, he is no older than anyone else.   
  
In comparison to a hundred million years, the difference between a few decades and a few millenia hardly matter.   
  
He has long accustomed himself to being in relationships with people who are so much younger than him, to pretending to be so much younger than he is, to living a double life, always.   
  
But thinking about the formation of the earth and the life of the different eras gives him an thrill and an uneasy pleasure. In this, the dichotomy of his personality merges into one entity. Who he always is and who he is for now and so many other people out there are all the same in this: Geology makes them feel very young.


	13. Remembering them alive

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This was in response to the prompt:  
> Highlander, Methos, He loved all of his children. He hated burying them.

Some of his children came with their mothers when he first married them. Other children he’s adopted. But he’s always had a soft spot in his heart for the children resulting from an unfaithful wife. A faithless wife is no burden at all when compared to welcoming his sons and daughters into this world and holding them in his arms as they first great the world.

Of the thousand regrets he has of his past, Cassandra is but a single one. At least half of the rest have to do with his parenting skills. Raising kids is hard! Each one is different. Each one is a revelation.

But he loved each and every one of them and for all his mistakes, he tries his best each time and never regrets loving them.

He has years worth of experience mourning the loss of a child. For the vast majority of his past, every parent gained experience in mourning the loss of a child. Children were fragile and it took both skill and luck to care for a child through each disease, through each injury, through each famine and drought and revolution and invasion and a million other things that killed so many.

Of his two hundred and forty-nine children, seventy-two of them survived to adulthood. Fifty-one of them were alive when he left that life to start a new one. 

It is a gift of memory that he treasures.

Death is part of life and he knows when he sees each child, that they will die one day. If seeing them die, is the price for seeing them live, then it is worth it. But if he can’t see them live, then he refuses to see them die. If the only way to keep them alive for just a little bit longer is to run away from the rumors of a devil who doesn’t age, then he will run and he will never look back.


	14. Nothing lasts forever

Penicillin was a miracle. Methos went back to school to train as a chemist just to learn about penicillin. He reveled in the fact that he could create a drug to reduce fevers that a generation ago would have killed.

He had been a doctor for thousands of years, but it had never really been a study in curing people so much as a study in losing them. How did they die, and why did they die, and was there any way to make the loss easier… until penicillin.

Even though his quickening took care of any illness, any injury, the drug’s very existence soothed a hurt that he had carried for so long it was a part of him.

In the euphoria of discovery, he met Pamela and her four-year-old son, John. She had been widowed in the war, and Methos had taken her out dancing and played catch with John, and asked her to marry him and grow old with him. He swore that he would never leave her.

It was an age of miracles and he could keep her.

She was his 68th wife and he loved her the way he loved the time period. Everything was possible. She wore trousers and was tall enough to face him eye-to-eye. She could drive a car and wanted to learn how to fly a plane.

He was at work in the chemistry lab creating miracles when the world reminded him of the lessons he had learned over the years. Nothing mortal stayed, nothing he loved could be kept forever.

The car crash had killed Pamela instantly. She hadn’t suffered and there had never been any chance to save her.

John had been too old at that point for Methos to hold in his arms but they had gripped each other’s hands during the funeral.

John was diagnosed with polio the next year. He died before reaching his fifteenth birthday.

Methos worked for another year in the chemistry lab but none of his coworkers were really surprised when he submitted his notice and left.  He didn’t bother even killing off that identity. Just left it to drift away and he started a new life.

This time, he worked in the music industry, because music was always ephemeral and never tricked him into thinking that maybe this time he could keep it.


	15. A Poison LIke Any Other

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This was written for the prompt:  
> Highlander, Methos, he cannot remember ever having a hangover

“Well, that was quite the party,” Methos chirruped. “And look,” he swept the curtains aside to let in the weak morning sun. “It’s sunny out.”

Joe thought about killing him. Why didn’t he have a sword cane? He should have a sword cane so that he could kill immortals with it. Of course, even if he had a sword cane, he would have to move in order to use the cane to kill Methos. “Please, Adam. Be kind to an old mortal.” 

Methos laughed. But he did bring over a glass of something for Joe to drink, it was thick and unpleasant but it helped make the hangover manageable. He levered himself upright on the sofa and looked around. Mac looked about like Joe felt, except minus Methos’ hangover cure.

Methos, on the other hand, looked bright and chipper. “Okay, old guy, how do you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Drink as much as you do. I know you’re immortal, but come on. You drank more than both of us put together and don’t even have a hangover. Mac is over there groaning, and you…” Joe shook his head.

Methos smirked. “Yeah, I don’t get hangovers.”

Joe studied Methos, wondering if this was a wind up for some joke. Likely at Mac’s expense but possibly at his own. “You don’t get hangovers. At all?”

“Nope.”

“And why not?”

“Joe, didn’t you once ask me to ‘name my poison,’ when offering me a drink? Alcohol is a poison, and I’m an immortal.”

“I would like to point out that Mac is over there trying not to puke his guts out.”

“Yeah, this modern alcohol is a lot stronger than what it used to be. Used to be that beer had just enough alcohol to kill off the bacteria, or you hoped it did, anyway, but not much more. You drank it morning, noon, and night and avoided all that nasty water. Mac probably thought he could drink as much of this stuff as the old stuff.”

Mac groaned from the corner. “Please leave me out of this.”

“You sure you don’t want some hair of the dog what bit you?” Methos offered.

“Go. Away.”

Joe laughed and then regretted it. “Ow. But come on, how can you possibly not get hangovers. There’s being able to hold your liquor and then there’s you.”

“Joe,” Methos sighed. “Alcohol is a poison and quickenings get rid of poisons just as they heal injuries.”

“But shouldn’t you still get the results? If you get cut, the cut gets healed but the blood doesn’t automatically come out of the clothes. Even with quickening healing the alcohol you should still get the results.”

“I don’t get hangovers, but here’s the real secret. I don’t get drunk either.”

“What?”

“My quickening heals alcohol before it makes it to my blood stream. For the most part. If I really, really want to get drunk, I can do it by IV with industrial grade alcohol. I tested it out once, and it was interesting, but really, I still healed too fast to really get the dehydration effect that causes hangovers. Maybe in my next life I’ll be a biochemist and see what exactly the quickening is doing with the alcohol.”

“So you drink beer like water because it is literally like water to you?”

“Water with a better taste. Yup.”

“And you let us all get drunk and be silly around you while you are stone cold sober?”

“Sober as a judge.” Methos grinned. “And not even the old school judges who were high as a kite most of the time trying to commune with the gods. Do you want me to tell you all about what you and Mac got up to last night?”


	16. The Value of Money

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This was in answer to the prompt: Highlander, Methos, sometimes he plays the lottery just to donate all his winnings to a kids' charity or orphanage

Methos goes through periods of wealth and periods of poverty.   
  
The reason that Adam Pierson isn't wealthy isn't to hide from anyone, although there's that, too. It's because Methos in the late 20th century isn't wealthy.   
  
Modern immortals seem to think that the older ones must be incredibly wealthy. Being able to make long-term investments is great and being able to inherit money from yourself can be a real benefit to accumulating it. On the other hand, he's had his nations invaded and his land lost by conquest a dozen times at least. Banks have closed. Hurricanes and droughts and earthquakes and mudslides and a dozen other disasters have all impoverished him.   
  
More often than that, though he just leaves his old life behind in order to start the next one. He could hardly leave his widows with nothing or his orphans with no inheritance.   
  
Plus objects and inheritance patterns could be tracked.   
  
There have been times when no one would take his money because he was holy and everything he wanted was given to him.   
  
There have been times when no one would take his money because he was cursed and communities would stone him to death before allowing him inside the bounds of their market.   
  
Money comes and goes and it's only as valuable as the things it can get him and as costly as its ability to tie him down.  
  
In the periods of wealth he takes advantage of the benefits and deals with the costs and in times of poverty he makes due with having a lot of knowledge. In most cases where it matters, knowledge really is power and can compensate for lack of money.   
  
He's been safely middle class for a couple of generations now, and looking at the lottery ticket, Methos wonders if that's about to change.   
  
Adam Pierson had bought it as a lark, but now it's a million dollars waiting to be claimed.   
  
How would his life change if he had this money?   
  
Was there anything at all that he wanted to buy at this moment in time?   
  
He already lived where he wanted to live, wore what he wanted to wear, and traveled when he wanted to travel.   
  
Money wasn't an end goal. It was a means. So what did he want this to be a means to?   
  
A million dollars is a thousand times a thousand. He thinks of the dollar menu at McDonalds and thinks of the times in his life when he has starved.   
  
He wants to live in a world where people don't starve.   
  
He sponsors a thousand children for a thousand days each.   
  
 *         *          *   
  
The next day Mac uses the news story about a big anonymous donation to Save the Children in his attempt to convince Methos that people are inherently good and care about each other. Methos rolls his eyes and counters with a few choice experiences from his own past.   
  
"People aren't good," he tells Mac.  
  
"But they're still worth saving," he only murmurs once Mac is out of earshot.

 


	17. Immortal with a Kiss

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> written for the prompt:  
> Highlander, Methos/Alexa, "make me immortal with a kiss"

"I wanted... I don't even know what I wanted," Alexa's words are half-muffled by Methos' shoulder but he can hear her well enough he keeps his arms wrapped tightly around her. She holders tighter still, as if there were any chance that he'd let go against her wishes. "But I wanted to live my life and leave something behind. Maybe I would have created something, or done something, or maybe just had a kid who had a kid and I'd leave behind a family tree. But I wanted... I didn't want to just disappear. You'll think I'm silly, but I wanted immortality."   
  
Methos felt his through constrict. He hadn't told her about immortals, he didn't plan to ever tell her. He couldn't. Even if she could deal with it, he couldn't deal with seeing the knowledge in her eyes. But still, "I don't think you're silly. I would do anything to make you immortal."   
  
He had tried. He had tried so hard, but the shards of the Methuselah stone were dispersed at the bottom of a river and all other possibilities researched and discounted.   
  
"I just want to be remembered."   
  
"That I can give you." He kissed the top her head. "I will remember you for all of my life."


	18. Identity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This was in response to the prompt:  
> Highlander, Methos /& Duncan, Duncan is getting old and Methos knows it was hard work to get him this far.

Methos is generally known, or rather, not known, as The Eldest.  
  
Darius was The Priest.  
  
Connor McLeod is The Highlander.   
  
Coltec was The Evil Eater.   
  
Amanda is The Thief.   
  
Most immortals who survive for long enough to develop personal relationships with other immortals acquire titles. The titles stay with them even as names come and go.   
  
Immortals change their identities regularly, at least once every generation and frequently more often than that. Names come and go with the time period, the geography, the culture. The titles are identifiers that allow friends and enemies to recognize an immortal, replacing their mortal name with an immortal identity.   
  
But Duncan has kept his mortal name for 15 generations. His immortal identity is merely an echo of his teacher's.  
  
That kind of retention of a simple mortal identity takes effort and cannot last forever. As idiotic as Methos thinks Duncan is being, he can't help but be impressed with the type of effort that went into keeping Duncan McLeod of the Clan McLeod alive and active. And he can't help but mourn the inevitable loss when Duncan starts getting old. Duncan McLeod is dated and anachronistic and it has been past time for him to be set aside.  
  
Methos avoids other immortals to the best of his abilities, but he does wonder, when Duncan finally accepts his immortality, what title will he have?


	19. Bullets really suck

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This was in response to the prompt:  
> Highlander, Methos, one can only die so often on a single day

Methos hates bullets with a burning passion.  
  
He hates dying but it's really more a strong dislike than a true hatred. After all, when he dies, he spends some time dead and then he wakes up. So far, at least.  
  
And he's actually rather ambivalent as far as guns go. They are useful tools and as long as he has one and the other guy doesn't, all is well; and if the other guy has one when he doesn't, then clearly he hadn't planned very well and had better work on that. When both he and the other guy each have a gun, then... well... a fair fight isn't exactly fair when one side is immortal and the other side isn't.  
  
But bullets... bullets were absolutely awful because unless a poor immortal were lucky and the slug of lead went clear through, then he wound up with a noticeable piece of metal in a place where no piece of metal should be.  
  
A bullet lodged in the heart was particularly frustrating.  
  
His heart stopped and he died. Then he woke up and his heart failed to start and he died. Then he woke up and his heart failed to start again and he died.  
  
He was only alive for long enough to punch a couple of digits into his cell phone at a time and then he died for long enough for the phone to revert to stand-by mode.  
  
Luckily he had a freakishly strong quickening from being really old and having killed a lot of other immortals in his time, because his quickening would eventually eat away at any foreign object left in his body.  
  
So eventually his heart would figure out how to work around the remains of the bullet.  
  
At which point Methos would probably get to enjoy the pain and frustration of dying from lead poisoning periodically until the thing finally wore away entirely.  
  
Bullets are pretty much the bane of his existence, Methos thinks. He really hates bullets.

 


End file.
